I haven't been to many funerals, but this marks the fourth year in a row that somebody I know has died. Chances are there will be two deaths one of these years and then I will be a different man. This time around, death evoked a sort of strange sadness, an inexplicable hilarity and an embarassing dissonance. I reflect at arms distance.
Two or three weeks ago I began writing a journal entry on Dissonance. I didn't finish it for a while and the ideas in my head dissapated. I came back around and then pushed it out the door, backdated appropriately. It is only slightly ironic that no comments have emerged. I didn't alert Facebook. But that sort of solitary feeling I had then has come in and out of focus as I read Jim Butcher's Harry Dresden and Charles Stross' Bob Howard. Howard, much more than Dresden is located, in a whirlwind of un-self knowledge as a trembling practitioner of arcane arts that are connected to unthinkable horrors. Both Dresden and Howard, by a combination of bad luck and usefull skills wind up working in parallel worlds with the rest of us civilians. Many are the days they wish they didn't know what they know, and everyday as they walk amongst us muggles they suffer a solitary dissonant distance.
When I got married in NYC, my cousin was the DJ and although I had the CD track listings fairly well documented, it did happen that an inappropriate cut of music interrupted the flow of our nupitals. The incongruity of the song was jarring.
So I'm at the funeral and this is what happens.
The dearly departed was not buried in the ground but entombed in a mausoleum. The service was brief, in one of the marble corridors. To my left and right are three foot squares that go from the floor to the 21 foot ceiling, each either blank or with the plaques of the dead and a holder for flowers. I can read the names and the dates and the seven word epitaphs as I walk towards our ceremony. There are words said. I recognize the rite. There is a song sung. I know the lyrics. There is a long mourful saxophone solo played echoing off the polished walls and floor. I've never heard it before and it goes long enough for me to believe that it is not a song at all. And yet, it sets all of the tone perfectly. It makes you want to have known someone in life who would play for you in death, and never worry about a CD player or a program guide. The pallbearers take the coffin and place it on the device, and rows of men in dark suits look at the wood of it. It is dark brown with brass, but the device looks like something that belongs in an auto mechanic shop.
The ceremony ends and the gravediggers engage the device which begins to scissor lift the coffin three squares up the West wall of the mausoleum. It groans like an old elevator filling the hall with the moan of its electric motor and the gravediggers adjust the safety bars with clanging as they ride up. The noise is startling and the crowd mumbles. The gravediggers are outfitted in dark blue coveralls and they move with a practiced casual efficiency. You immediately know they are in a union. They mix the tub of spackle as the device rises higher. They stop at the crypt and lock a mechanism in place. The push the coffin in on heavy rollers and it sounds like the clatter of the giant aluminum storage containers they roll into aircraft, and it is just about as solemn as the movement of freight. One of the gravediggers follows the coffin in. He must have a secret exit. They place the slab, and then jack down the device. It makes even more noise going down than up. It's all inappropriate noise, jarring and incongruous.
I must go. I move to another hallway of the Sunset Mission Mausoleum. It is where the more expensive crypts are. There are fresh wreaths. I sit alone, exhausted. I really didn't know the man that very well. We were distant family but he never gave me a lesson to carry on. None of this makes sense. It's just that sad. All of the old men there, I second-guessed them saying who's next, hopefully not me. Who will come? What song will they play? I sit sprawled out with the program in my right hand and the tears come very, very slowly. I am wearing dark sunglasses. Inside. I hadn't seen Frank since the last funeral, or was it a wedding? Just as I walked away from him, I recognized him staring halfway up the marble wall. Half of his life is entombed in the very same hallway; the mother of his two sons. I sit alone staring at my shoes. The fragrance of the gardenias is overpowering, and the people in the other hallway are now back to conversational volume, and now I sob. There is no rhyme or reason here. It's all just inappropriate.
The sax player espies me in my state, he shuffles up to me in his red and brown houndstooth jacket, fedora and bluetooth. He offers words of comfort, that I remain to carry on. I sniff a thank you and he moves on to the next corridor. I don't have anything to carry on, but the musician must have thought I was a son. I am not. I am a grandson-in-law and I didn't know Edward's name was Edward until today. I never got past the family appellation. And suddenly I feel as though I'm a minor character in a disjointed French dramatic farce.
And everything is hilarious. I begin to chuckle and then I am laughing like a madman - like a murderer let go on a technicality. Nothing makes sense and nothing has to make sense, all that truly exists is the lot of us desperately trying to make sense of things. We're pattern making, socializing, inference engines spread across the inversions and chaos of life trying to pinky-swear our way towards confidence. But there's always a gravedigger. Even when there's no grave, there's always a busy, harried, gravedigger into whose eyes you can stare for a moment and tell that he'd rather just have a sandwich.
I don't care for the irreverent. I'm done laughing and I'm ready to drive away. Nobody came with me so I get out to the car and curse the heat. Nothing's funny any more. I drive to the next node of the day's ritual and arrive before the crowd. There is Jack Daniels, bleu cheese and carpaccio. I have all I need and I want to get seriously plastered, but I cannot. There are other distant relatives in town from another arm of the family and I have obligations to the living. I beg off early and head to the 405.
I've never felt so full every little moment and of nothing in particular. I've never felt so moved by the idea that it might just be completely impossible to make sense of anything in human life. I cried because I was truly alone in the Sunset Mission and I knew it, and I laughed at the idea that anybody could make that better. I'm not quite old enough to worry that I might be next, and yet somehow I know that I'm as ready to die as I'll ever be. I'm not quite sure that the acceptance of my inevitable death makes me appreciate life any more - so many of us fuck it up so completely. So many of us exist trying to get a clue and never communicate jack. So many of us spend our entire lifetimes never connecting with any permanence.
I feel only the need for judgment in the immediate. Ghost Dog Samurai life in the moment, ever telling the whole truth to yourself and acting on what you know to be true. That very well may be all there is.
Missions fail.
It could not be proper for me not to draw a lesson, even that there are no stories worth retelling and that all human meaning is the integrity of action. But that is the square I land on, naked without a homily. You can life your entire life and nobody knows you but you and your faith that God knows you, or your faith that there is no God to know you. Either way the last hands that touch your body will very likely be people you could never know. Make of it what you will. Make of it whatever you can.
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